Berners-Lee calls for Web 2.0 calm — Analysis Five years after the first internet bubble burst, we're now witnessing the backlash against Web 2.0 and a plethora of me-too business plans, marketing pitches and analyst reports exploiting the nebulous phrase.

Firefox 2.0 beta 2 boasts enhanced look, features — Mozilla released Beta 2 of its upcoming Firefox 2 browser for developer review Aug. 31, emphasizing that it is being made available for testing purposes only. The release contains a number of new features, as well as some enhancements to look and feel.

Wal-Mart and Apple Battle for Turf — The retail behemoth isn't happy about the iPod maker's plans to offer movie downloads through iTunes. Has Wal-Mart met its match? — The guy from Bentonville, Ark., surely isn't on any of Hollywood's leading man lists.

MySpace driving more retail traffic than MSN search — New Hitwise findings indicate that MySpace sent more US traffic to online retail sites last week than MSN search, the third largest search engine on the web. That's big news, as it's tangible evidence that youth oriented online social networking …

America's Most Wired Cities — With most of the U.S. technology industry focused on the East and West coasts, you'd think the best place to get online would be San Francisco, or perhaps New York City. But Atlanta tops Forbes.com's survey of America's most wired cities.

Reports: Apple to hold special event on September 12th — Based on reports from European Apple enthusiast websites and last night's YourMacLife radio broadcast, Apple is in the process of inviting members of the press to a special event for new products, to be held on September 12, 2006.

Japanese robot adds wheels to iPod — TOKYO - The new Japanese robot Miuro turns an iPod music player into a dancing boombox-on-wheels. The 14-inch-long machine from ZMP Inc. blares music as it rolls and twists from room to room. The robot, which looks like a ball popping out of an egg, has a speaker system from Kenwood Corp.

Social software is not a fad — Ryan Carson says he doesn't have time to use all those social apps like del.icio.us and Flickr and Digg, although he thinks they are cool, and Phil Edwards says that he likes them too but sees the phenomenon as appealing to a relatively small niche of Web geeks …

Paris Hilton hacks voicemail using Asterisk — Celebrities Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are in a well-known feud that now has entered one of my favorite realms, namely VoIP. According to an InfoWorld article, (which Asterisk VoIP News reminded me about), it is alleged that Paris Hilton used …

Have I lost my "blog power"? — Anand M., in India, asks "has Scoble lost his blog power?" (I linked to him and he didn't get many visits). My read? If I ever did have blog power, it's gone now. Digg and TechMeme have all the power now. — I think Rageboy has the clue to what's going on here …

It's here: the 16GB USB dongle — Toshiba has announced the world's biggest USB dongle - an impressive 16GB. — The TransMemory line of flash memory sticks range from 512MB up to 4GB, but with a special "limited edition" 16GB version, presumably just for showing off.

Social Widgets — I've spent a lot of time thinking about the MySpace music player and the YouTube video player. I believe these two "widgets" (if you can call them that) have been very significant parts of the success of those two services. — In the case of MySpace, the ability to simply click …

Microsoft's PR agency admits it doesn't "get" blogs! — My former boss at the Financial Times Paul Abrahams, heads up the sizeable UK office for Waggener Edstrom—Microsoft's long standing PR firm. Microsoft is WaggEd's largest client, and also it's largest cash cow, a very close relationship now well into its third decade.

AIR FORCE WANTS SOFTWARE SPIES — What if you could send a computer program to do the job of a spy, or a bomber, or drone? It sounds like science fiction — and it'll probably stay that way, for a long, long time. But Air Force researchers think there's enough to the idea to start funding …

Times Reader looks slick, but Arrington appears unimpressed — As a UMPC owner and a die-hard eBook and digital magazine reader, I was thrilled to hear about the Times Reader application announced in April. The app for XP and Vista looks to bring the truest reader experience to the computer screen out of everything I've seen so far.

CrossOver Mac beta released: run Windows apps in OS X — Nope, this isn't a virtual machine a la Parallels or VMware for Mac, this is the real deal: CodeWeavers released the beta of CrossOver Mac, a WINE environment port to OS X that allows you to run Windows apps without actually running Windows.